ATCx DEM 2020 - The need of proper modeling of traction control system in mobility simulations on soft soil

When building simulation models of military vehicles for mobility analysis over deformable terrain, the powertrain details are often ignored. This is of particular interest for electric and hybrid-electric vehicles where the maximum torque is produced at low speeds. It is easy to end up with the drive wheels spinning and reducing traction and eventually the vehicle digging itself down in the soil.

The presentation discusses the reason why simplified terramechanics models (ST) such as the Bekker-Wong models are not suitable for dynamic traction control studies and shows how Altair EDEM's complex terramechanics models (CT) can be co-simulated with multi-body dynamics software Adams using the ASCI interface.

The presentation focuses around an 8x8 transport vehicle with and without TCS. To model the traction control system a PD controller is used to limit the slip velocity at low speed and wheel slip at higher velocity. A soil model has been correlated to the Pratt & Miller sandbox and a 35% hill climb was used to tune the TCS parameters in the co-simulation.

Presented as part of the virtual ATCx Discrete Element Method in November 2020.

Speaker: Jesper Slattengren, Technical Fellow, Pratt Miller Engineering
Duration: 20 minutes